Friday, July 15, 2005

Why are you punching yourself?

One thing that always gets me is how the successful organizations tend to be the ones to always get attacked by the underdogs. Maybe this is just inevitable but I really think they are fighting the wrong battle. I read through the influential blogs in the recruiting industry and Monster tends to be constantly under fire. Why? They have been one of the most successful on-line recruiting advertising organizations in the world. Why don’t you see blogs talking about all the crummy sites where we have spent time and money with no results? We aren’t a huge Monster user. We get about 5% of our hires from Monster, however, this is huge when you are hiring very niche, hard to find people. We easily get our ROI from Monster.

So why fight Monster? Why not take market share from the Newspapers where there are still billions of dollars up for grabs if the on-line recruiting industry can get their act together and continue pulling customers away from newspapers. By the way—if you really want to make a big deal about organizations getting into what they are calling “vertical search”—which is totally inaccurate by the way, then the credit should go to Flipdog. They were the first major player in technology of this kind. Oh, and did I mention that Monster purchased them a long time ago. This just happened before people were making such a big deal about it. Let’s give credit where credit is do—this is no new innovation. And my advice to the on-line recruiting organizations is fight for more market share from the news papers instead of each other. Once you have achieved this then feel free to attack each other. Monster gets this….maybe others should listen.